The Root of the Darkness Within
by ali10
Summary: The Phantom of the Opera is a mystery shrouded character. This one shot fic exposes the roots of his nature.


Disclaimer: I do not own anything about the Phantom of the Opera.  I wrote this as an assignment for my French class a few years ago, so please r&r.

                He had few recollections of life before the circus.  Nary a kind word, living in the streets of Persia; friendless, homeless, without family; it had been difficult to say the least.  He had gotten a break around the time he was ten.

                A circus of oddities happened to be going through town.  The owner of the operation heard of the street-boy freak who always seemed to be found in the opera district, ears straining to catch a snippet of the music drifting around the old buildings.

                The owner of the show found him and took him in.  At first he simply helped out, cleaning out the camp and taking care of the animals.  As he grew, though, the young music-loving street boy started losing control of himself.  He was no longer able to let the ridicule about his distorted face slide off like water, rather he soaked every jibe, every fearful glance and filed it into memory.  He grew to hate the very people he had once thought of as friends.

                Finally one night after a particularly rowdy audience, he could no longer hold back all the hate, all the frustration, all the pain he had held back for as long as he could remember.  He went on a rampage.

                He was brought into submission by two of the show's strong arms, but not before he seriously injured six other members of the traveling circus.  The two men ushered him bodily to the show's owner, who upon deciding that he was too dangerous to roam free, had him caged.

                He was too emotionally spent to care, at first.  As the days dragged into months and the months into years, of moping about and being laughed at and frightening people, he started to once again nourish the hatred that had gained him the cage.  Though in truth he was caged, his mind flew with the fantasy's he had of one day escaping.

                The thing he had always missed most about his life in the street was the opera.  The one thing that could always be counted on was music.  He was always motivated by the way in which a voice could so smoothly twine around the sounds of the instruments and make the listener feel for one moment connected with all in attendance, it fascinated him.

                He was close to twenty-five when they came to the city of Paris.  People came as always to see the freak, him, and he didn't disappoint them.  A face out of night mares greeted those who came to see the oddities brought by the show.

                He knew Paris was a place where the opera was appreciated.  It would have been a fine place to live, for a normal person.

                On the third night of the show's stay in Paris, something happened in a stroke of luck such as only destiny can orchestrate.  A storm came the winds howled and they brought with them thin strains of music.  A rusty old lock rattled against an old wheeled cage, in the camp of a visiting show.  These were the only sounds.  Drops of water whipped the ground and wind swirled the roiling clouds into a black mass that completely blocked the bright full moon.  No one was on the street.

                It just so happened that in this storm the aforementioned lock, weakened by years of weathering happened to pop open.  The freak inhabiting the cage had been asleep huddling against the door, a place of relative warmth, and he was spilled out as his portal to freedom opened.  Stumbling on legs long unused to any sort of roughness of terrain he jolted his way across the cobbled street and followed the remnants of wisps of music to a beautiful old building.  It matched the picture of the finery opera deserved which he held in his head.

                Next to this great building he felt not ugly, but as if he were reflecting the beauty of the place.  As he stood on the street staring in awe and wonder, a small group of women came bustling out of the opera house, they had been in late for a rehearsal.  Instinct, from his street days, took control and he quickly slid out of the light and used their temporary blindness, due to the change in lighting, to slide past them and into the grand building.  The heavy door slammed behind him, ending yet another chapter in his life.

                He stayed there undiscovered while owner of the oddity show conducted a search, for an "ugly and potentially dangerous young freak" as they advertised.  Meanwhile life seemed half a dream.  Every day his new home in the basements of the opera house rang with music.  The nights he had to himself, he could set up the den in which he would live for the rest of his life and learn the secrets of his new home.

                It was not an exciting life, nor what most would call normal or happy, but he was pleased with simply being near the music he so loved.

                That changed one day.  He was getting on in years, close to forty, when she came to the opera.  Christine Daae had come for singing lessons, her voice was sweeter than honey and he could not hear enough of it.  She sounded as an angel to him.  He knew only one thing; he, who had been labeled freak and renamed "phantom of the opera" would train the young talent, and prove to the world, and himself, that there was still beauty to be seen and heard.  What's more there were still things worth seeing and hearing in places people walk blindly, and deafly, past every day.


End file.
